Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

Vital Behaviors Produce Remarkable Results Vital Behavior Blueprint is your ultimate guide to building sustainable organizational habits—whether you want to improve customer service, boost productivity, launch strategic initiatives, or embed best practices at work or in society. This book will transform how you approach large-scale behavior change and performance improvement. Inconsistent behavior across individuals and teams is an expensive roadblock to success, but consistent behavior can be a turbo-boost for your organization—and it costs nothing extra. Yet making consistent behaviors a reality can feel like herding cats. The problem isn’t your leadership; it’s the behavior ecosystem reinforcing old habits. Drs. Julie M. Smith and Lori Ludwig, renowned experts in organizational behavior change, present a 5-step Vital Behavior Blueprint—a clear, actionable roadmap to help you and your team identify and implement the critical few actions that drive extraordinary results. You’ll learn how to: Pinpoint Vital Behaviors: Identify the few high-impact actions essential to success, with Key Performers and customers agreeing they are critical. - Build Ally Networks: Connect employees and stakeholders as Allies who share mutual goals and are willing to support one another in building new habits. These networks foster a culture of collaboration that enhances traditional top-down management practices. - Provide 3 Pillars Needed to Transform Vital Behaviors into Habits: Clear expectations - Actionable feedback (5:1 positive to constructive) - Barrier removal to enable desired behaviors Typically, only 30% of employees receive all 3 Pillars. By focusing on Vital Behaviors and leveraging Ally Networks to strengthen the Pillars, organizations can ensure 100% of employees receive this essential support, driving results to new heights. What sets this book apart is its simplicity and ease of implementation. Smith and Ludwig turn complex organizational behavioral science techniques into actionable steps that anyone can implement. Their writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex topics easy to grasp. Packed with real-world examples, research findings, inspirational success stories, and free tools from their Behavior Blueprint HUB, this practical guide gives you everything you need to create lasting behavior change at scale. The result? Satisfied customers, a more engaged workforce, consistent execution, and measurable performance gains—all by focusing on the behaviors that matter most. Stop struggling with inconsistent habits. Start building a Vital Behavior culture that thrives. Vital Behavior Blueprint shows you how. "Great book—truly a game changer! My best read this year. This book reveals a Missing Link in my career, which was mainly successful but hard to sustain transformation efforts. I plan to implement these focused steps in each of my major transformation initiatives this year and next!" —Steve Hoeft, author of Shingo Award-winning books Stories From My Sensei and The Power of Ideas to Transform Healthcare "This book is truly outstanding. The approach holds immense value for countless organizations. Real-world examples helped deepen my comprehension of what I could do immediately to improve performance." —Connie Conboy, Past Board Chair, Association of Internal Management Consultants and ANSI-ASQ Accreditation Board; Past VP of Bayer Material Science Business Excellence and Strategic Initiative; Past Director, MedAccred "One of the most important leadership lessons I learned is that human behavior can be a root cause of poor performance—and most importantly, with the right tools, we can do something about it. This should be taught in every business school. Luckily, it's available now in this book. —Joe Jimenez, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Aditum Bio, Former CEO, Novartis "Expert-crafted guide to large-scale behavior change, based on real science." —David H. Freedman, Science Journalist